This bank was between the apartment I lived in and the Pizza Hut I worked at as a waiter. I lived in an apartment on N.W. 9th Avenue right off N.W. 13th St. The Pizza Hut was up on N.W. 16th (I think). I can't remember why I walked to work that summer. I think I was totally broke and something was wrong with my car. I definitely had my white Toyota Corolla station wagon by then. This was the summer of 1989. I made the above protest image that same summer too. I waited tables five nights a week, stayed up all night every night, and slept all day, every day. It's hot as hell in Gainesville during the summer. It's very humid there and the air is unusually still. I remember at the time thinking to myself that it had been a mild summer and then I realized I'd hardly been outside during the day for an entire summer.

I walked by that damned sign for weeks. At some point I started thinking about what sort of alternate sentences I could create using the letters they had used to make their statement. It originally had some sort of loan offer. So early one Sunday morning, on my way home from a Saturday night shift, at 2 a.m. or so, I altered the sign. It stayed that way all day that Sunday. Monday morning they discovered it and returned it to its original dignity -- with the addition of a locked plastic cover for good measure.

As I recall Phil took the picture. I may have a copy of it somewhere but I found it on Brian's MySpace page. And Tom had posted it there! What a trip.

I met Jill in September of 1988. She had a major lasting impact on me in two ways: I learned about the Fall from her and I discovered Re/Search #11 Pranks! because of her (her roommate had a copy of the book on the bookshelf in their living room).

Saturday, May 19, 2007

I got this book from the garage of my step-mother's house on Ilex Circle in Palm Beach Gardens (circa 1983-5). I have no idea who it originally belonged to or where it came from. I carried the book around for years before doing anything with it and then in 1995, the last time I returned to school (when I finally finished) I did a project that used the above image. The image was a page or two inside front cover.

Basically I scanned the image and then converted it into vector art using a "tracing" program that came with CorelDraw. It made this incredibly complex object. I'm actually amazed that my old computer (my first computer) a Gateway pc (with the intel 486 processor) could handle such a complex vector file -- but it could. Was CorelDraw that good? Anyway, I turned the vector soup from the conversion into a bunch of discrete objects I could move around. I constructed the final animation out of this material. It was made one frame at a time in CorelDraw. I would move everything I wanted to move (figuring 15 frames per second) and click "Save As." I did this over and over again. I worked in the dark, mostly in my underwear, for a few days generating all the frames. I did little else while I was working on it. Move everything slightly, "Save As."

My original idea was a little bit different than the animation below. I had planned to create a poster-size printout for each frame and then find some public location to display the printout, one at a time, in succession. I figured it would take a year to "perform" the animation in this way. It would have been an animation with a frame rate of one frame per day (video is typically 30 frames per second and film is typically 24 frames per second). What I was interested in was the idea of the poster subtly changing every day. Would anyone notice these gradual, subtle changes?

I would have then documented this, every day (for the duration), and then turned these photos into another animation.

The final version, the animation below, was exhibited only once, in Los Angeles, 1997. I can never remember whether I made it in 1995 or 1996.